Easter is around the corner. We will all eat too much, hate ourselves for our lack of self-control and we will all make post-Easter resolutions about dieting. So let’s examine some of the fad diets, the myths of these diets, what they deliver and do not deliver, and let’s see which is the only diet worth being on, a diet we can live with in our everyday lives.
Paleo, Dukan, 5:2, Sugar Free, Bulletproof, Hormone Cure, Virgin, Atkins, Cabbage Soup diet, Juice diet, CSIRO diet, Weight Watchers are just some of the diets that claim you will lose weight with ease.
Let’s have a look at a couple of fads and if they work and more importantly, are they healthy diets? There are a few that I would seriously like to debunk aggressively because they are popular and very bad for the health of anyone undertaking them. Let’s start with the craze of the moment, the Paleo diet, which by the way is not an official diet (without research) but is one of the most googled diets and increasing in popularity. The thinking is that we should eat like cave men who lived 10,000 years ago! Foods which can be hunted and gathered only, meat, seafood, eggs, nuts, seeds, fruit, vegetables, herbs and spices, a regime supposedly based on the Palaeolithic era before the development of agriculture approximately 10,000 years ago. This means no cereal grains, dairy, potatoes, refined sugar … even salt; it’s a given that there would not have been processed food at the time. This to me seems very much like all the high protein, low carbohydrate diets.
If you embark on the Paleo diet today the benefits are that you don’t eat processed food and sugar, but to be completely without dairy could lead to deficiencies in nutrients such as calcium. The idea of this diet is that our genes have not evolved with our diets over the millennia and this has been hotly disputed. We do know that several populations evolved the ability to digest milk as adults around the same time as humans started farming and other populations evolved extra enzymes needed to digest starch. But most important is that it is debatable that our prehistoric ancestors were that healthy. Let’s not forget that potatoes, tomatoes, corn and many other foods were isolated to the Americas, so the argument about how our genes have evolved to tolerate certain foods becomes blurred. Humanity’s evolution around food varies from one continent to another. The Palaeolithic man of the Americas was eating differently to the European, the African or the indigenous Australian.
The most famous high protein diet is the Atkins diet, which has been around for a while. Dr Robert Atkins, who was himself 100 kilos at some stage, put himself on a high protein diet in 1963 with great success, and went on to publish Dr Atkins’ Diet Revolution in 1972, making it one of the most sought-after diets. Yes you lose weight rapidly, but you have bad breath, dizziness, insomnia, nausea and constipation. The Dukan diet seems to be modelled on the Atkins diet on a close look, but both these diets run the risk of heart disease. It is worth mentioning, though, that in 2012 Pierre Dukan was removed from the French Association of Medicine for violating the organisation’s medical code of practice by practising medicine as a business. Last year he was also struck off the medical register for promoting his controversial diet commercially.
5:2 is one diet that seems as if it has merits. You eat normally most days except two days in the week where you slash your calorie intake to 500 calories for women and 600 for men, which is basically fasting. I have written recently about the benefits of fasting but let’s summarise; we know that fasting boosts life span and research also suggests that it could boost brain cell growth and might protect the brain from Alzheimer’s, research on people over 70 has shown that intermittent fasting led to a 30 per cent improvement in verbal memory after three months.
The Sugar Free diet tells us to cut out all sugar, fruit, dairy and some vegetables. But most sugar free diets focus on added sugar, no more cakes, biscuits, sweet drinks, processed food and alcohol. We don’t need sugar the way we need essential fats, protein and carbohydrates. Sugar is turned into fat by the liver and accumulates there and turns into liver disease and diabetes. Also high sugar diets can cause us to eat even more because of the high that sugar gives us.
The list of diets are endless. Here are the top diets for 2015: 5:2, Dukan diet, Paleo diet, Atkins diet, Alkaline diet, Cambridge diet, South Beach diet, Slimming World diet, Slim-Fast diet, Lighter Life diet, Weight Watchers diet, Rosemary Conley diet.
When I began writing this article I had not heard of most of these diets. I have gone over them as carefully as I possibly could for a short article; a lot of these diets also rely on supplements which can be very expensive, and the majority of them would be very difficult to maintain, in my thinking. I’ve chosen to write about the better known ones but I will also give what I consider the best judging not only from research for this article but by my accumulation of information over the years about food knowledge.
On the list above the best diet is not included as most of the above are American. The CSIRO diet is by far the best.
It has been thoroughly researched by the best scientists and you can buy the books either as an eBook or in hardback. This diet is based on the Mediterranean diet and we all know that the Mediterranean diet is the best normal diet.
I have written very recently on Hippocrates and his intervention into health through diet. It seems to me that nothing is new when it comes to healthy eating, what is new is unhealthy eating. It’s up to us to make sure that we eat a balanced diet, stop eating before we are full, drink alcohol in moderation and have sweets only on special occasions.
The next article will be on Easter food, but as we will all overeat on that wonderful Greek Orthodox celebration, keep these diet hints in mind. In the meantime, until then I’ll give you some more Lent recipes.